The main theme

of his art is the phenomenon of the city, which he has focused on in all artistic forms until 2010. In painting and graphic art, he transformed it into magical metaphysical compositions that refer to human memory as an inexhaustible source of the search for one’s own identity. Later, they were complemented by the architecture of rock formations reminiscent of cities from the environment of his childhood. After 2000, the theme was expanded by photographic concepts of “still lifes”, and in drawing and painting by abstract geometric concepts based on a refined illusion of space.

Prints

In his prints in the mid-1970s, Růžička applied the technique of line engraving in linoleum to feature themes from motoring and automotive sport. The prints acquired a new visual quality in the early 1980s, when their exclusive theme became the space of urban architectural complexes. The linoleum printmaking enabled him to create Constructivist concepts of flat geometric structures, in which mechanically arranged horizontal lines form a rhythmic hatching. The anonymous buildings are static, without being outlined in space, and their perspective is built only by the transition of white and black – of light and shadow with the grey surfaces of the interface. The contrast between the spatial sensibility of the architecture and the flat nature of the structure of the lines that give them a unique character.

At the end of the 1980s, the artist stopped printmaking, but he returned to this “traditional” technique in the early 1990s, first with small-scale prints and later in 2005 with larger formats, in which he examined the space in various ways. He used the demanding technique of color registration in multiple layers. The cityscapes were replaced by unspecified interiors with endless labyrinths, evocative of the mysterious mazes of the Jewish ghetto known from the Jewish-German literature of Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Gustav Meyrink and others. Růžička openly claims this inspiration, as well as his admiration for the masterpieces of the early Italian Renaissance. In his latest linocuts, executed until 2010, the urban complexes are complemented by the architecture of rock cities and sandstone walls and their peaks.

Paintings

The first paintings of urban complexes from 1981 and 1982, inspired by Růžička’s stay in Berlin and his scholarship trip to Perugia, Italy, already have an original character. They are related to Růžička’s prints; in principle they represent their translation into painting. The exact reality of the city, the anonymous static complexes of houses, palaces and industrial objects are transformed into subjective, ghostly metaphysical concepts with a distinctly flat stylization. The mysterious dreamscapes of abandoned buildings, empty city corners and avenues, whose austere facades emerge like the backdrops of a theatrical scene from a strange nightmare, exist in timelessness, on the edge of dream and reality, like the solitary objects in the streets and squares that sometimes remain “forgotten” in these paintings. This fantastic, imaginative painting clearly refers to the architectural concepts of the Italian classics of Metaphysical painting, such as Giorgio de Chirico or Carlo Carrà. Růžička’s keen sense of color is manifested in his use of the old traditional painting technique of pure pigments, which models the subtle muted valences of almost monochrome compositions. The original visual quality of the paintings is enhanced by being mounted in the artist’s own frames, which gives them the character of paintings-objects. The paintings from the last decade are purely abstract, referring to the first hints of abstraction in Růžička’s paintings of the mid-1960s. Their gradual formal reduction leads to colorful geometric compositions, in which the work with space and its structure, the fundamental feature of all of his production, creates an optical illusion of perspective. This is played out by labyrinths of stacked, layered and overlapping fragments with subtle colors in illogical connections that substitute for optical reality. The ever-present phenomenon of light, an essential building block of Růžička’s entire oeuvre, is increasingly evident in these works.

Drawings

In Růžička’s oeuvre, drawing exists in parallel with the prints and is related to them in its artistic form, especially in the sets of ink brush drawings coming into being from 1987 onward. In the expressive economy and precision, his drawings refer to the exact nature of his linocuts. Their theme is mainly the architecture of rock cities to be found in the Broumov Walls, transformed into a set of simple lines that evoke imaginary rock formations, labyrinthine paths and hidden entrances. The black Indian ink is sometimes softened by a combination of colored inks or Indian inks. A few older pen drawings from the mid-1980s are almost visual transcriptions of his linocuts, where the precisely drawn horizontal shaded lines replicate the austere facades of the architectures. In recent years, Růžička’s expressive range has expanded to include colored charcoal and chalk drawings, with a predominantly painterly character. The dominant line structure has slowly been replaced by the modelling of volumes, and their muted, refined color range corresponds with the composition of a painting.

Photography

Photographic concepts were systematically created from the mid-1970s. The starting theme was also the phenomenon of the city, but rather in the role of documenting the disappearing world of the suburbs and industrial architecture. Since 2000, these original negatives have been gradually digitalized by the artist. Initially, these records served as models for his subsequent graphic art. Some photographs and prints are therefore directly related and the juxtaposition of these two techniques in this case is intentional. The dominant theme of the photographs has been the romantic scenery of ruins in dark forests, reminiscent of the melancholic landscapes by the 19th-century German Romantic painter Caspar David Fridrich. At the same time, these photographs represented captured memories, whether of the environment of Růžička’s childhood in the abandoned borderlands (an important aspect of his whole oeuvre), or as a reflection of places such as the Prague suburban areas, Berlin, Dresden, the devastated town of Most, Broumov, Perugia in Italy and other places. In recent years, his art has expanded to include still lifes, not in the traditional sense, but rather in the form of spatial concepts of ordinary things that surround him. The black-and-white and color compositions are dominated by the interrelationships of objects and their parts both outside and inside. In a gradual abstraction and at the same time deformation, both spaces merge at the expense of reality and legibility. The apparent randomness of the selection and the focus on detail point towards a further rethinking of the actual possibilities of the photographic medium.